Authorities begin closure of downtown homeless camp

Monday marked the beginning of the end for the homeless encampment in downtown Fort Lauderdale, as officials announced they will close the small tent city that has vexed the business community for years.

Smack in the middle of downtown, surrounded by government offices and business towers, the homeless camp has persisted despite numerous efforts to clear it out.

Monday, local officials said this time will be different.

“Our goal is to see that every resident of the current downtown Fort Lauderdale encampment is home for the holidays,” Broward Mayor Beam Furr said at a news conference in Fort Lauderdale City Hall.

Over the years, patrons of the Broward County Main Library adjacent to the camp, as well as local businesspeople, have complained about the persistent encampment. Furr said the latest approach will be humane and dignified, attempting to address the causes of homelessness rather than simply clear the property.

The approximately 75 people living in the camp — just south of Broward Boulevard, between Andrews and First avenues — will be placed in housing, and the makeshift community will be gone by year’s end, officials said. The formerly homeless will be helped with services to address mental illness, substance abuse, job training and financial literacy.The $4 million solution includes daytime services that other homeless people — not just those living outside the library — can partake of, to prevent another camp from cropping up. Starting Monday, no new campers will be allowed.

At the camp Monday morning, workers pressure washed the concrete pavers and sidewalks, and there was a bustle around the tents. The life stories are as diverse as the homeless themselves, who are young and old, black, white and Hispanic, healthy and unwell, jobless and employed.

Dexter Williams, 44, and his wife were preparing Monday to move into a hotel. “Today, today, today,” he said. “It’s awesome.”

Inside their two-tent spread, Williams was proud of his generator-powered Roku TV and his air purifier/air conditioner. Williams pointed to a small shrine to his mother, above the mattress, saying she is always with him.

He and his wife, who did not want to be identified, “lost everything through some poor decisions,” she said, and have lived in the camp for about two years. Williams works at a restaurant on Las Olas Boulevard but hasn’t worked long enough to afford the hefty fees to get into an apartment.

Outside their tent, Angel Blackwell, who sleeps in the open air, said the help is “a long time coming.” The camp is full of “people just trying to survive, basically,” and Blackwell was expected to be relocated to a hotel, as well.

In the camp, the outdoor residents have seen fighting, stabbings,a shooting, drug use and people being robbed, they said. They were soaked in the rainy season and faced tropical storms and threatening hurricanes.

A 57-year-old woman living in the camp with her husband said there are gangs present. She was afraid to elaborate on what she’s seen, or to give her name, saying, "The stuff that I have seen in the last five months is more than I would wish in a lifetime. Anything you can think of that's really bad. You name it, I've seen it."

A 43-year-old woman named Ruth said her family would be upset if they knew she lived there. She works two jobs and wore a crisp white blouse. Raised by family members in Virginia, she reconnected with her birth parents later in life. Her father is ill, and she moved here to help take care of him.

“I sacrificed this just to see my daddy,” she said. “I let him be safe, and I sleep out here.”

She said she just needs “a boost,” not permanent help. If someone paid her deposit so she could get into an apartment, she said she could pay the rent.

Across the camp, a 55-year-old woman named Bridgette Smart said she became homeless after she was hospitalized for a heart surgery and couldn’t work.

“It’s not what I want,” she said, wearing Hello Kitty pajamas, “but it’s what I have.”

She said she sleeps on the sidewalk with Jean Blanca, 30. Blanca said he was diagnosed with bi-polar disorder and schizophrenia and was prescribed psychotropic medicine that he isn’t taking. He was denied disability benefits and is trying again.

“I couldn’t live with my mom anymore,” he explained. “We always have conflict. She told me to find some place to live.”

Unlike previous attempts to close the camp, this one was planned for months and is a collaboration of the county, the city of Fort Lauderdale, the United Way, the business community and non-profit/faith-based groups. The funding comes mostly from Fort Lauderdale and Broward County — $1.2 million each. Some funding also came from the federal and state governments, and from businesses, including AutoNation, BB&T, Bank of America and Castle Group.

Business leaders said the presence of the camp was bad for tourism and for the economy.

“A better community is better for business,” James Donnelly, CEO of Castle Group and chairman of the Broward Workshop business organization, said Monday.

Broward County’s Mandy Wells, deputy director of the human services department, said the solution is not to simply clear out a camp or move the problem out of a prominent line of sight.

“This will not be a quick hit,” Wells said. “This is a marathon, not a sprint. This is a process, not an event.”

Other communities like Seattle, Los Angeles and New Orleans successfully closed camps, she said, and leaders from Broward studied how they did it.

Broward County already over the past year found permanent housing for about 70 people who lived in the camp, she said. The remaining 75 will be assessed one by one, and those who need help paying an apartment deposit or getting a job will eventually be helped to financial independence. Some people might be reconnected with family. Others, like those with mental illness, will need housing permanently. Wells said the annual cost to house the chronically homeless is yet to be determined.

Newcomers from other regions or states won’t be given free housing, she emphasized. The program aims to help Broward’s chronically homeless — those in the camp or elsewhere downtown or in the county.

The county will renovate the encampment site into a public plaza, Furr said. The exterior of the library will be renovated, also.

“We want to move people as quickly as possible,” said Broward Commissioner Nan Rich, chairwoman of the Broward Homeless Continuum of Care Board.

The balmy climate, high cost of housing and generosity of strangers have helped keep the ranks of homeless filled in Broward. And local authorities — mostly in Fort Lauderdale City Hall — have made a series of missteps in trying to eliminate them.

Last year, the city filed a complaint with the state health department about rats in the camp, then said the camp had to be closed immediately because the state declared it unsanitary. Front-end loaders rolled in, and homeless people who weren’t present to collect their belongings returned to discover they’d been tossed in the trash. The city’s actions pushed the camp off Stranahan Park, the city’s property, and onto the county’s end of the block, closer to the county’s Main Library.

In recent years, the city passed a law making it harder for homeless people to store belongings outdoors, banned panhandling and passed a law prohibiting outdoor sleeping. Earlier this year, the city temporarily shut down a mobile shower program for homeless people.

Fort Lauderdale Mayor Dean Trantalis said the camp “stood as a symbol of our inability to adequately address” the problem.

“We are determined not to repeat the mistakes of the past,” he said.

He said the courts have ruled that a homeless camp can’t be shut down unless a community offers a reasonable alternative.

Wells said the county doesn’t intend to use police powers to force people out of the camp, although it could.

“What we’re trying to do is at every point not criminalize” homelessness, she said. “It doesn’t solve anything.”